Tag Archives: defense policy

A Thought on the Army of a Free Country

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Wretchard, of Belmont Club, has a very good take on President Barack Obama’s few days ago commencement speech at the US Military Academy. Read the whole thing.

Read the whole thing, including the comment thread attached to it. Wretchard commenter Mr. Lucky2 points out that Ayn Rand also addressed West Point: the graduating class of ’74. Her remarks, quoted in part by Mr. Lucky2, stand in sharp contrast to Obama’s…address.

The army of a free country has a great responsibility: the right to use force, but not as an instrument of compulsion and brute conquest—as the armies of other countries have done in their histories—only as an instrument of a free nation’s self-defense, which means: the defense of a man’s individual rights. The principle of using force only in retaliation against those who initiate its use, is the principle of subordinating might to right. The highest integrity and sense of honor are required for such a task. No other army in the world has achieved it. You have.

West Point has given America a long line of heroes, known and unknown. You, this year’s graduates, have a glorious tradition to carry on—which I admire profoundly, not because it is a tradition, but because it is glorious.

Since I came from a country guilty of the worst tyranny on earth, I am particularly able to appreciate the meaning, the greatness and the supreme value of that which you are defending. So, in my own name and in the name of many people who think as I do, I want to say, to all the men of West Point, past, present and future: Thank you.

Mendacity, and the Color of Money

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According to The Daily Caller,

Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) expects to have more money for medical care than it can spend for the fifth fiscal year in a row.

In fact,

[The] VA carried over $1.449 billion in medical-care funding from fiscal year 2010 to 2011, $1.163 billion from fiscal year 2011 to fiscal year 2012, $637 million from fiscal year 2012 to 2013, and $543 million from fiscal year 2013 to 2014.

[The] VA expects to carry over $450 million in medical-care funding from fiscal year 2014 to fiscal year 2015. VA received its full requested medical care appropriation of $54.6 billion this fiscal year, which is more than $10 billion more than it received four years ago.

Yet the AFGE, a Federal employee union, says that the VA is underfunded in the areas about which it cares. We’ve also seen this underfunding bit presented as an excuse for the failure of the VA to provide access to medical care—those secret waiting lists, for instance: the VA doesn’t have the funding to man the facilities to shorten/eliminate those waits.

But this isn’t contradictory. The VA is short of money here, and has an excess there, but it can’t just transfer the excess from there (the medical side for instance) to here (the AFGE’s identified shortfall side)—that’s a color of money problem: Federal funding that’s appropriated for a purpose requires Congressional approval to transfer the money to another purpose, even within Departments. It’s on Congress to stop overfunding one purpose and to stop underfunding another purpose.

And there’s this:

The Daily Caller reported that VA spent more than $3.5 million on furniture the night before the government shutdown on the last day of fiscal year 2013 so as not to lose that money in the department’s budget the next fiscal year.

This certainly looks shameful and shady—and it is, at bottom—but that’s not entirely the VA’s fault. Here it’s the case that, the VA’s medical care funding notwithstanding, in general Federal budgeting is a use-it-or-lose-it proposition: Departments cannot carry forward unused appropriated funds; they must spend the money in the fiscal year for which it was appropriated, or they lose the unspent funds.

These things are what come of a Byzantine budget process—it’s Congress’ failure of budgeting.

This does not, though, absolve the VA personnel of their mendacity in their failure to take care of our veterans as they’re charged to do. No amount of confusion from a labyrinthine budgeting process can excuse falsifying wait lists or simply not bothering, leaving our veterans without prompt care when it’s needed.

Disband the VA

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In A Conservative’s Treatise on American Government, I wrote about the Veterans Administration’s active and deliberate assault on religious freedom, using our veterans as pawns in that effort. In summary form, here’s what I wrote about the VA’s misbehavior in that arena.

At funeral ceremonies in our National Cemeteries, VA management attempted to dictate the permissible content of prayer, presuming to censor a Pastor’s prayer. Following this—on the heels of a Federal judge’s ruling that the government may not and can not determine the content of prayer—a widow was barred altogether from burying her husband in a national cemetery because the honors and ceremonies associated included prayers and actual references to God.

These scandals have been forgotten by an NLMSM that’s also afflicted with AADD.

My recommendation at the time was to remove the National Cemetary System from the VA and place it directly within the DoD for administration by military personnel.

After the revelations of the inexcusably…shoddy…treatment of our veterans by the VA, including (but not at all limited to) 40 or more of our veterans dying while being held on VA waiting lists to get medical treatment, those waiting lists being cynically manipulated so as to make the VA bureaucrats look good (at the direct expense of those veterans they’re charged with supporting), whistle blowers being suppressed and/or reassigned for being too pushy with their concerns; all of that coupled with President Barack Obama’s decision to do nothing about any of that beyond his formulaic chit-chat about being upset over it, this is no longer enough.

The VA must be disbanded altogether, and all of its personnel returned to the private economy.

The VA has a budget including some $61 billion dedicated to “supporting” veterans and their families, $12.6 billion for education benefits, and a total budget of some $140 billion in FY13 for things like VA payroll, building new medical facilities, R&D for veteran-needed prosthetics development, and the like. There are some 21.5 million veterans in the US, currently.

Those $61 billion should be continued as budget items, and paid to our veterans as vouchers. Our veterans and their families are fully capable of determining for themselves what doctors they should see and at what medical facility they should see them. Their treatment régimes are matters to be determined by the veteran and his doctor; the VA has forfeited its…authority…to have input into this. The $12.6 billion should be continued as budget items, and paid to our veterans as vouchers, also. This is, largely, what happens today; it should be continued.

The remainder of the $140 billion should be continued as budget items, and used to plus up the vouchers paid to our injured veterans.

The VA’s current 170 medical centers and 350 clinics should be returned to the private sector, where competent management will improve these facilities’ ability to serve our veterans—and which increase in the supply of such medical facilities also will have the salutary effect of holding down the cost growth rates of services provided to all Americans by the increased number of medical centers and clinics, if not actually reducing those costs.

Whither our Technological Edge?

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USAF Colonel Dean Hullings, of AFSC’s Cyber Superiority Division told a National Space Symposium audience that the US is behind other countries in cyber defensive and offensive capabilities. The only other countries in the mix, it seems to me, are Russia, the PRC, Iran, and Israel. We don’t need to be leading from behind here.

It’s not only a lack of interest on the part of an administration bent on withdrawing the United States from the world and abrogating our leadership role, though. Bureaucracy—not unique to any particular administration, but an entity in itself—is having a major effect, also.

The agency responsible for cyber-related acquisitions—of any type—is the National Reconnaissance Office, a DoD agency separate from the AFSC. The NRO also is set up to do satellites, not networks or cyberspace—it lacks the expertise here to do equipment, software, or personnel acquisition.

This weakness is overlain by the DoD’s poor acquisition process.

Just getting through the budget system takes about two years. Add the requirements process and you’re talking another two years. That means you are about three years behind the latest technologies, thanks to Moore’s Law.

And, again, there’s that bit about understanding what it is that’s being acquired, whether by NRO or DoD generally:

[F]oreign suppliers might build code into chips or firmware to thwart or warp how a US weapon works….

But that’s not enough of a threat.  There’s this, too:

Militaries have been messing with each other’s radios and radars for generations, transmitting deceptive signals to spoof and jam them. But if the enemy’s radios and radars are run by computers—and most now are—you can also transmit signals to hack them. Then, if the enemy’s computers are linked together—and America’s certainly are—your virus can spread throughout their network.

Hmm….

A Bit of Paranoia

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In 2010, a report from Amnesty International painted a grim picture of North Korea’s crumbling health care system, with witnesses and health care workers recounting barely-functioning hospitals, multiple medication shortages and epidemics caused by malnutrition.

And

US military officials soon grew concerned over the possibility of a lethal pathogen originating within North Korea, as the nation’s health care officials would be nearly powerless to stop the spread of infection. And if such an illness were to continue to expand, a global pandemic would likely occur.

But what if this is deliberate? Baby Kim isn’t stupid, and he is insane enough to give serious thought to such a thing. Northern Korea can’t invade with their army, so might they invade with disease? They’d infect a major fraction of their population (they’re already allowing a major fraction to become infected) and let a goodly number leak across the DMZ, which really is quite porous from the north’s side. And many of these diseases can spread via airborne vectors, against which the DMZ is no barrier at all.

A thug’s version of Napoléon’s levée en masse.